UglifyJS vs Webpack

Overview

Webpack

Stacks45.0K

Followers28.1K

Votes752

GitHub Stars65.7K

Forks9.2K

UglifyJS

Stacks776

Followers40

Votes0

GitHub Stars13.4K

Forks1.2K

UglifyJS vs Webpack: What are the differences?

Code Transformation: UglifyJS focuses primarily on code minification, compression, and mangling to reduce the size of JavaScript files. On the other hand, Webpack is a module bundler that allows for code transformation using loaders and plugins, making it more versatile in handling different file types and dependencies.
Module Bundling: Webpack excels in bundling various modules and assets into a single file, optimizing loading times and reducing network requests. UglifyJS, while it can be used with Webpack for minification, lacks the module bundling capabilities that Webpack offers out of the box.
Asset Management: Webpack provides comprehensive asset management capabilities through loaders and plugins, allowing for the processing of CSS, images, fonts, and other assets alongside JavaScript files. UglifyJS, on the other hand, is specifically focused on optimizing and compressing JavaScript code without extensive support for managing other types of assets.
Development vs Production: Webpack offers different configurations for development and production environments, enabling features like hot module replacement, source maps, and code splitting during development, while optimizing and minifying code for production builds. UglifyJS is typically used in production builds to minimize file sizes but does not have the same level of development-specific features as Webpack.
Tree Shaking: Webpack's tree shaking functionality allows for the removal of unused code during the bundling process, resulting in smaller file sizes and more efficient applications. UglifyJS, although it can remove dead code paths, does not have the same level of sophisticated tree shaking capabilities inherent in Webpack.
Plugin Eco-system: Webpack has a vast plugin ecosystem that extends its capabilities for tasks such as code optimization, asset management, and performance improvements. UglifyJS, while it can be used as a plugin with tools like Webpack, does not have a standalone plugin system like Webpack's, limiting its extensibility and adaptability in different development scenarios.

In Summary, the key differences between UglifyJS and Webpack lie in their focus on code transformations, module bundling, asset management, development features, tree shaking capabilities, and plugin ecosystems.

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Advice on Webpack, UglifyJS

Aleksandr

Contract Software Engineer - Microsoft at Microsoft-365

Dec 23, 2019

Decided

Why migrated?

I could define the next points why we have to migrate:

Decrease build time of our application. (It was the main cause).
Also jspm install takes much more time than npm install.
Many config files for SystemJS and JSPM. For Webpack you can use just one main config file, and you can use some separate config files for specific builds using inheritance and merge them.

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Comments

Abigail

Dec 10, 2019

Decided

We mostly use rollup to publish package onto NPM. For most all other use cases, we use the Meteor build tool (probably 99% of the time) for publishing packages. If you're using Node on FHIR you probably won't need to know rollup, unless you are somehow working on helping us publish front end user interface components using FHIR. That being said, we have been migrating away from Atmosphere package manager towards NPM. As we continue to migrate away, we may publish other NPM packages using rollup.

224k views224k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Webpack	UglifyJS
A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows to load parts for the application on demand. Through "loaders" modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.	This package implements a general-purpose JavaScript parser/compressor/beautifier toolkit. It is developed on NodeJS, but it should work on any JavaScript platform supporting the CommonJS module system (and if your platform of choice doesn’t support CommonJS, you can easily implement it, or discard the exports.* lines from UglifyJS sources).
Bundles ES Modules, CommonJS, and AMD modules (even combined); Can create a single bundle or multiple chunks that are asynchronously loaded at runtime (to reduce initial loading time); Dependencies are resolved during compilation, reducing the runtime size; Loaders can preprocess files while compiling, e.g. TypeScript to JavaScript, Handlebars strings to compiled functions, images to Base64, etc; Highly modular plugin system to do whatever else your application requires	Parser; Code generator; Compressor; Scope analyzer
Statistics
GitHub Stars 65.7K	GitHub Stars 13.4K
GitHub Forks 9.2K	GitHub Forks 1.2K
Stacks 45.0K	Stacks 776
Followers 28.1K	Followers 40
Votes 752	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 309 Most powerful bundler 182 Built-in dev server with livereload 142 Can handle all types of assets 87 Easy configuration 22 Laravel-mix Cons 15 Hard to configure 5 No clear direction 2 SystemJS integration is quite lackluster 2 Spaghetti-Code out of the box 2 Fire and Forget mentality of Core-Developers	Pros 0 Great for javascript minification
Integrations
JavaScript	JavaScript

What are some alternatives to Webpack, UglifyJS?

gulp

Build system automating tasks: minification and copying of all JavaScript files, static images. More capable of watching files to automatically rerun the task when a file changes.

Grunt

The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you've configured it, a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you—and your team—with basically zero effort.

Underscore

A JavaScript library that provides a whole mess of useful functional programming helpers without extending any built-in objects.

Deno

It is a secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript built with V8, Rust, and Tokio.

Chart.js

Visualize your data in 6 different ways. Each of them animated, with a load of customisation options and interactivity extensions.

Brunch

Brunch is an assembler for HTML5 applications. It's agnostic to frameworks, libraries, programming, stylesheet & templating languages and backend technology.

Parcel

Parcel is a web application bundler, differentiated by its developer experience. It offers blazing fast performance utilizing multicore processing, and requires zero configuration.

rollup

It is a module bundler for JavaScript which compiles small pieces of code into something larger and more complex, such as a library or application. It uses the new standardized format for code modules included in the ES6 revision of JavaScript, instead of previous idiosyncratic solutions such as CommonJS and AMD.

Immutable.js

Immutable provides Persistent Immutable List, Stack, Map, OrderedMap, Set, OrderedSet and Record. They are highly efficient on modern JavaScript VMs by using structural sharing via hash maps tries and vector tries as popularized by Clojure and Scala, minimizing the need to copy or cache data.

Backpack

Backpack is minimalistic build system for Node.js. Inspired by Facebook's create-react-app, Zeit's Next.js, and Remy's Nodemon, Backpack lets you create modern Node.js apps and services with zero configuration. Backpack handles all the file-watching, live-reloading, transpiling, and bundling, so you don't have to.

Related Comparisons

UglifyJS vs Webpack: What are the differences?

Code Transformation: UglifyJS focuses primarily on code minification, compression, and mangling to reduce the size of JavaScript files. On the other hand, Webpack is a module bundler that allows for code transformation using loaders and plugins, making it more versatile in handling different file types and dependencies.
Module Bundling: Webpack excels in bundling various modules and assets into a single file, optimizing loading times and reducing network requests. UglifyJS, while it can be used with Webpack for minification, lacks the module bundling capabilities that Webpack offers out of the box.
Asset Management: Webpack provides comprehensive asset management capabilities through loaders and plugins, allowing for the processing of CSS, images, fonts, and other assets alongside JavaScript files. UglifyJS, on the other hand, is specifically focused on optimizing and compressing JavaScript code without extensive support for managing other types of assets.
Development vs Production: Webpack offers different configurations for development and production environments, enabling features like hot module replacement, source maps, and code splitting during development, while optimizing and minifying code for production builds. UglifyJS is typically used in production builds to minimize file sizes but does not have the same level of development-specific features as Webpack.
Tree Shaking: Webpack's tree shaking functionality allows for the removal of unused code during the bundling process, resulting in smaller file sizes and more efficient applications. UglifyJS, although it can remove dead code paths, does not have the same level of sophisticated tree shaking capabilities inherent in Webpack.
Plugin Eco-system: Webpack has a vast plugin ecosystem that extends its capabilities for tasks such as code optimization, asset management, and performance improvements. UglifyJS, while it can be used as a plugin with tools like Webpack, does not have a standalone plugin system like Webpack's, limiting its extensibility and adaptability in different development scenarios.

UglifyJS vs Webpack

Overview